Oil dips ahead of US jobs report

SINGAPORE: Oil prices pulled back in Asian trade on Friday, giving up gains in New York as investors braced for the release of a key US jobs report, analysts said.

New York's main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in July, shed 28 cents to 74.33 dollars a barrel while Brent North Sea crude for July was down 31 cents to 75.10 dollars. Oil prices surged Thursday after a weekly oil inventories report from the US Department of Energy showed a larger-than-expected dip in US gasoline inventories, indicating stronger demand.

Crude inventories also fell in line with expectations. Analysts said investors were staying on the sidelines in anticipation of job creation and unemployment figures from the Labor Department due out later Friday. "The movement we've had in oil prices today is fairly modest after the gains we saw last night," said David Moore, a commodity strategist with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

"In general, investors are probably sitting waiting for the payrolls and the employment reports in the US," he told AFP. The Labor Department is due to release employment data Friday and most analysts expect it to show 500,000 non-farm jobs were created last month, up from 290,000 in April. The unemployment rate was expected to dip to 9.8 percent from 9.9 percent in April.